The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

by H. P. Lovecraft

  Exact data regarding the Pnakotic Mss. are lacking. They were brought down from Hyperborea by a secret cult (allied to that which preserved the Book of Eibon), & are in the secret Hyperborean language, but there is a rumour that they are a translation of something hellishly older—brought from the land of Lomar & of fabulous antiquity even there. That they antedate the human race is freely whispered. Curious parallelisms betwixt them & the Eltdown Shards [see “The Shadow Out of Time,” note 40, below] have been pointed out—as if both were remote derivatives of some immeasurably anterior source, on this or some other planet (Lovecraft to Richard F. Searight, February 13, 1936, Selected Letters, V, 225).

  64. The first capital of the Hyperborean continent, described in the stories of Clark Ashton Smith (see “The Call of Cthulhu,” note 55, above).

  65. Get it?

  66. Dwarf galaxies visible in the Southern Hemisphere. Richard H. Allen, in his 1899 Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, notes that the major Magellanic Cloud was known to the early Persian astronomer Al Sufi, who named it al-Bakr (the Sheep) and pointed out that it was only visible from the southernmost tip of Arabia.

  67. The Tao, the “way,” is the central allegory of Taoism and is by definition unknowable.

  68. Called “Dholes” or “Bholes” elsewhere, they seem to be large, slimy, worm-like creatures from the description in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Machen’s “The White People” (see “The Dunwich Horror,” note 44, above) mentions “Dôls” but without description. “Dholes” are also wild dogs that inhabit South and Southeast Asia.

  69. They first appeared in Frank Belknap Long’s 1931 story “The Hounds of Tindalos” and are said to live in the angles of time; that is, they cannot enter curved time, where humans are believed to live. In this formulation, time is tangible, like fabric, with billows and creases, as it were. See “The Dunwich Horror,” note 25, above.

  70. “The Curse of Yig,” another story by Zealia Bishop almost completely rewritten by Lovecraft, introduces this figure. Lovecraft worked on the story in 1928, and it appeared in Weird Tales in November 1929. Yig is described there as a snake-god, half-man, half-snake, but little other information is provided.

  71. In other words, points out Robert M. Price, in “Demythologizing Cthulhu,” “the gibbering dæmon-sultan of the Necronomicon was merely a cipher for the much more frightening revelations of science” (8).

  72. Fritz Leiber Jr., an early enthusiast of Lovecraft’s work and a highly regarded critic of the genre as well as a renowned science-fiction author, in his highly appreciative essay entitled “Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin: Lovecraft’s Contribution to Speculative Fiction” found the idea amusing, calling this “the charmingly friendly touch of the Mi-Go carrying about with them through space in small cannisters—tucked under their wings or clutched in their maternal pincers—the living brains of beings so unfortunate as not to be able to travel space embodied. In the story this is effectively presented as horror, but on second thought such immortality has great appeal” (169).

  73. A Victorian term for a malarial or intermittent fever, in which successive fits of hot, cold, and shaking occur. Edgar Allan Poe’s characters, such as the narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” frequently shook or shivered with fright “as with a fit of the ague.”

  74. Of course, this is the voice of the disembodied Akeley.

  75. Some have suggested that the first buzzing voice is that of Nyarlathotep, the dominant leader of the creatures and an object of worship, here spoken to by another of the alien visitors. See “Nyarlathotep” (here, above).

  76. Why was Wilmarth allowed to escape? Perhaps to spread the word of the coming of the Mi-Go, which seems on the verge of disclosure? If so, something must have subsequently occurred that delayed the public revelation.

  77. See note 46, above, for the suggestion that this is the “mask” of Nyarlathotep. However, as Steven J. Mariconda points out in “Tightening the Coil: The Revision of ‘The Whisperer in Darkness,’” the allusions to “prodigious surgical . . . skill” and the use of the word “identity” here suggest that the mask is a representation of Akeley’s actual face.

  Poster from The Whisperer in Darkness (GraveHill Productions, 2007).

  At the Mountains of Madness1

  There can be little doubt that in this short novel, Lovecraft’s work reached its zenith. Cinematic in its sweep, epic in the scope of the story and the weight of its revelations about the place of humankind in the universe, it is no wonder that S. T. Joshi, in his masterful biography of Lovecraft, calls it “a triumph in every way.” Lovecraft termed it an attempt at “non-supernatural cosmic art,” and the meticulous scientific records kept by Professor Dyer and Dyer’s cautious, measured tone lend utter credibility to the tale. Lovecraft was a student of many sciences and had a special fondness for polar expeditions; such knowledge is used to great effect here. Sadly, the story was rejected several times before finally being published near the end of Lovecraft’s life and then by Astounding Stories, which paid him a pittance.

  I.

  I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.2 It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic3—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.

  Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and ærial, will count in my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried.4 The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures, notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.

  First page of the manuscript of At the Mountains of Madness.

  In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.

  It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection. Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to 1000 feet deep all formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this being made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned.5 Four large Dornier6 aëroplanes, designed especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with adde
d fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.

  The Dornier aeroplane. Artist: Jason C. Eckhardt, copyright © Jason C. Eckhardt 1989, reprinted with permission

  We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season—or longer, if absolutely necessary—would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd.7 With frequent changes of camp, made by aëroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material; especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life-history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth’s past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of common information;8 and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we should enlarge the aperture by blasting in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition.

  Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly exposed land surfaces—these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels.9 We could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan—which we could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as ours—that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic.

  The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the University—Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the physics department (also a meteorologist), and I, representing geology and having nominal command—besides sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aëroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships—wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam—were fully manned.10 The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation,11 aided by a few special contributions, financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough despite the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvellously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition—ample though it was—so little noticed by the world at large.

  As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbour on September 2nd, 1930; taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains—J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran whalers in antarctic waters. As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs—table-like objects with vertical sides—and just before reaching the Antarctic Circle, which we crossed on October 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies,12 we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigours to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

  Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°. On the morning of October 26 a strong land “blink” appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77°9'.

  The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich,13 and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.

  On the seventh of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier; rising perpendicularly to a height of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac14 peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama, while beyond it rose the white, ghost-like height of Mt. Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano. Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently,15 and one of the graduate assistants—a brilliant young fellow named Danforth—pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope; remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe’s image when he wrote seven years later:

  —the lavas that restlessly roll

  Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek

  In the ultimate climes of the pole—

  That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek

  In the realms of the boreal pole.16

  Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe’s only long story—the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym.17 On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of
grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.

  Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement.18 Our sensations on first treading antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us.19 Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’s slope was only a provisional one; headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs,20 sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras both ordinary and ærial, aëroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits (besides those in the planes) capable of communicating with the Arkham’s large outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship’s outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser’s powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head, Mass. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice21 for another summer’s supplies.

  I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie’s apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge aëroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party—twenty men and 55 Alaskan sledge dogs—was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25° above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigours of this sort.22 The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other supplies.